28 November 2006

In researching and crafting the text for my artefacts for our class exhibit on inventions and innovations in London, I have been thinking about why people feel the need to document their lives. The items I am working on are a Ciné-Kodak Model B movie camera, and a Bell & Howell Filmo Ciné Projector (both dating from about 1925). One area that I have been thinking about, and that I did not get to address in the exhibit work, is the effect that photography and filmmaking has on our ability to tell our stories. So, I decided to think about that here.

Some people will argue that photography and filmmaking are nothing if not the stories of our lives. I disagree. I think that images (both still and moving) are quite often poor substitutes for the stories they attempt to relate.

According to documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, photographs are false pathways to memory. Real memory, as I heard on CBCs The Current for November 16, 2006, is created in the mind. While photos can trigger memories, they are not the memories themselves (My classmate, Molly, wrote a great blog about something quite similar to this). Yet, we increasingly rely on photography and other images (like films) to document the past, rather than using our brains to hold those memories.

Images have a valuable place in our world, to be sure. My fear is the potential erosion of our memories – and collective memory – that comes along with our reliance upon them. While images are valuable for those who were not present to be able to get some sense of the past, are they really a substitute for the real memory? (I suppose you could ask me what “real memory” is, and I would have to concede that that is a fair question, and I do not have the answer for it. What I mean, in this case, by real memory, is the memory of the past contained within our heads).

I think a personal example will demonstrate the fallibility of photographs as windows into the past, and how little information you can actually ascertain from a photograph. And hey, I fully expect a retort from anyone who has studied photography and what can be gleaned from pictures. I think that part of the reason I feel the way I do is because I am ignorant of some of the finer details involved in picture-viewing. But I still think I have a solid argument here.

So, I am going to present you, the reader, with two pictures. One of myself, and one of my fiancée, Donna:

So, what do you get from these pictures? What can they possibly tell you? I’ll give you a minute.

Okay, that’s long enough. So, what did you come up with?

What you would not – and could not possibly – get from the pictures is what led us to end up in the situation in which we were taking pictures of ourselves, and crying with laughter at the results.

Did you understand from the pictures that we were in a computer store in London, Ontario? Did you know that we were there because the hard drive on my computer had decided to die that day, and that it was tearing me apart? That I was pretty close to having a breakdown?

Or did you get that while I was trying to haggle with the store clerk about getting a new drive, Donna, that angel, had walked up to a computer and seen a ghastly picture on its screen, only to realize, to her horror and amusement, that it was an image of herself?

It is important to this story that you remember that I was having a terrible, rotten, no good, very bad day.

Donna then dragged me away from the clerk, tears beginning to well up in her eyes, choking back laughter. She made me stand in front of the computer, while I had my picture taken in this warped way.

We took these pictures, and then a few more, and through it all I was crying – doubled-over, even – with laughter. It was exactly what I needed to calm me down and make me see the lighter side of the whole day.

I can think of no possible way that anyone could have understood any of that part of the story behind these pictures simply be looking at them. To do that, Donna or I would have had to tell you the story. And what is more, it is possible that the story Donna would tell you would be quite different from the story I just told.

Photographs do not stand in as a record of the reality of what happened. And I recognize that no credible historian would tell me to use photos as my sole source when looking into the past. I also admit that the memories inside our heads are far from perfect. The historian in me believes that history is story. My fear is that many of the stories that can and ought to be told are not, simply because people think it sufficient to supplement the story with an image.